Flapping Your Arms Can Be Flying by Hall & McHugh. SF Orbit Graphic Arts, 1967

  
Flapping Your Arms Can Be Flying, by Robert K. San Francisco: Orbit Graphic Arts. Foreword by Edward Maupin of Esalen Institute, Big Sur. The best way to describe this "book" is to quote the Juxtapoz article about East Totem West, (the collection of artists revolving around Joseph McHugh, one of the two authors of this collection of "Psychedelic Poetry"). In 1967 - 1968, a small group of immensely talented people in the San Francisco Bay Area came together to form a short-lived but highly inventive poster and notecard company, East Totem West. It's founder, Joseph McHugh, took the poster - heretofore used primarily as a travel enticement or concert announcement to a new, revolutionary place: the poster as art. He began creating images - through the process of printing - that harkened to acid-trip visions and spiritual mandalas... It was as much a function of the place and times as it was the combination of people that made East Totem West happen: the Bay Area was host to several underground newspapers (The Berkeley Barb, the Black Panther Party paper, the Oracle, among others), influential personalities, (Alan Watts, Bill Graham, Ken Kesey, to name just a few) a music revolution (including such icons as the Jefferson Airplane and Janis Joplin), and no fewer than five college campuses. Posters were the medium of choice, and poster stores enjoyed a heyday that has never been approximated.

It was the perfect time for East Totem West to create, produce and distribute its vital artwork. But as Alan Bisbort explains, the story of East Totem West is not the story of the 1960s, or even that sliver of it fondly recalled as the summer of love. It is the story of one group of pilgrims who found themselves in one another's' hippie company' for a brief burst of time in a very fertile place and then moved on, dispersed like spores from a magical pod, to other callings.

The end products of their collaboration are what you hold in your hands. Good condition: slight rubbing to op art red-and-green cover, mostly where cover meets spine. Back cover with very little rubbing, mostly where cover meets spine.

Bend in spine from being read, but spine is intact and book is structurally sound. One small foxing mark or other stain on fore edge, very faint foxing or other stain along tail. Otherwise clean and bright on good quality paper in excellent condition.